Solved Unknown sound file playing

[RoWin7]

I'm the only user and Admin. I lost my Win profile on my other machine, and rebuilt it with the help of this forum. Only thing wrong: Every 15 minutes, my computer plays the Westminster chimes, more so on the hour.

Task Manager says it's the win.\sys.32\audiodg.exe file --Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation running through Local Service. It's an audio enhancement provided by the audio company, but it looks like the machine is using MS generic audio.

I checked my whole system for .wav files, and I have no sounds set up for events in Control Panel\Sounds. There's no matching chime anywhere, so is it in the exe file itself? Is it safe to dump that file?

 

[iko22]

audiodg.exe is part of the system, so I'd leave it alone.

Have you done Clean Boot (Clean Startup) , to determine if audio event caused by startup program?

Other possibility, are you using Outlook? I hear it possible to setup a sound reminder without visual appearance, in Outlook.

 

[RoWin7]

Not using Outlook, but Mozilla Thunderbird. None of my startup programs have any preferences related to sound files, and I'm running the same startup programs that I always run on all 3 machines, identical to this machine. How do I do a Clean Boot?

Does Local Service refer to the Local in Users\[myname]\AppData\Local?
There's no "Local user."

 

[file3456]

Task Manager has some hidden areas that you can easily overlook. At least that was true for me when I looked in there using it for Freefilesync. You might want to try and run Autoruns and see if you can find it. Do not disable or remove anything you have no idea about. Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs

 

[iko22]

How do I do a Clean Boot?

There is a nice Seven Forum's tutorial that can be located here, Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup . Only need complete Step One, to determine if there are any culprits.

 

[RoWin7]

It's wasn't just on startup. The audiodg.exe file disappeared between chimes, then reappeared 15 minutes later.
Searched Autoruns tabs, no audiodg.exe in Logon or any other tab.

I just did a System Restore to before the phantom chimes. Problem solved. Easier than searching for a needle in a haystack of clean-startup. I haven't been getting any work done this week.

But I've saved Autoruns and the Clean-Startup tutorial in my files. You can't have too many troubleshooting tools.

Thanks to all who helped.